Cormac Ó Gráda
Famine: A Short History
Princeton University Press, 2009
344 Pages
£16.95
ISBN 978-0691122373

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In the 20th century alone, an estimated 70 million people perished from famine. To name a few of the most disastrous incidents: during World War II, the Bengal Famine claimed 8 million lives; in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, famine took over 30 million lives; and in the mid-1980s, famines in Ethiopia threatened over 8 million people with starvation.

While famine has commonly been attributed to bad harvests, recent scholarship has shifted focus from natural disasters to government failures. Cormac O’Grada’s new book, Famine: A Short History, is no exception. A professor of economics at University College Dublin, O’Grada examines the complex relationship between famine, politics, and public action. Famine’s strength derives from O’Grada’s mining of the historical record, using extensive empirical data to explore the causes and consequences of this fatal phenomenon. Ultimately, O’Grada boldly claims that the “onward march of accountable government will rid the world’s last vulnerable regions of the scourge of famine.” The book, however, grazes the surface of various complex and unresolved policy debates about the end of famine without exploring these issues in depth. Fair enough, for a general history of famine, but this passing investigation makes his bold claim seem somewhat over-optimistic and specious.

The direct relationship to death is what distinguishes famine from chronic malnutrition, in which lack of food adversely affects people’s health but does not directly lead to fatality. Accordingly, O’Grada defines famine as “a shortage of food or purchasing power that leads directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger-induced diseases.” He goes on to explore the history of thought behind what causes such dire food scarcity. As O’Grada notes, Thomas Malthus was one of the most recognized figures to theorize on this subject. Famously, in 1798, he grimly hypothesized that the world’s population would grow too large for the earth’s productive capacity and that absolute food shortages would cause famine: “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” This was, perhaps, a plausible claim at the time. But Malthus failed to foresee the technological advances that would ultimately enhance the earth’s productive potential.

Echoing the evidence presented by other scholars of famine, O’Grada posits that in the modern era, famine is no longer the result of absolute shortages of food. In absolute terms, worldwide food production is enough to feed the world’s population. And presumably, advances in communication and transportation technologies should aid in getting food wherever it is needed. So why does famine persist?

Borrowing from Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, O’Grada argues that famine is a social phenomenon. For Sen, famine marks “the inability of large groups of people to establish command over food in the society in which they live.” Even if the proximate cause of a local food shortage is natural disaster or a bad harvest, the extent to which human life is affected by such shocks depends on the way that society is organized. This line of reasoning holds true for recent disasters: Hurricane Katrina, for instance, could have been less devastating if the government had been more organized, or more concerned.

Until relatively recently, the most aid that famine victims could hope for was local relief, either from the public or private sector. As O’Grada demonstrates, elites have long accepted moral obligations to relieve the worst effects of famine. In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the wealthy would often intervene to prevent food crises from becoming famines. But there are limits to private citizen action. As O’Grada puts it, “Private charity may do much to alleviate individual suffering, but the relief of hundreds for an indefinite period comes only within the means of governments.”

Sen argues that only democratic governments are consistently moved to prevent major disasters affecting the populace. Yet, despite agreeing with Sen’s argument, O’Grada fails to explore its implications for famine management in non-democratic or weak states.
In doing so, O’Grada sidesteps the vital and highly contentious debates over the meaning of “accountable governance” as applied to both sovereign nations and international organisations. If all national governments were somehow organized so as to be accountable to their citizens, then famine might be a rarity. However, accountable governance across all states is a reality yet to be realised. The crucial point here is that the end of famine, in the near future, has to do with responsive international governance and its tenuous and complicated relationship with issues of national sovereignty and development.

Mobilising international efforts to address famine is at times a Sisyphean exercise. How can we get the global public invested and interested in famine? The mechanism of primary importance, within democratic states, is the media. In a democracy, a free press with transparent lines of communication should spread both information and criticism. Governments failing to avert excess mortality, due to famine, would be penalized by their citizenry. However, as O’Grada points out, while this may be the case domestically within democratic governments, the extent to which the international press can garner the same effect on famines occurring on foreign territory is questionable. In his words, “the attention span of the international media—and their readership—is too fleeting to monitor famines from start to finish.” NGOs working to prevent famine have to mobilize the concern of an international public—and this often requires the use of devastating images that only become available after a major problem has begun.

O’Grada cautions us that overemphasis on the existence of corrupt governments, and their role in allowing famines to persist, allows the international community to justify their inaction. There are some donors, however, who have chosen to deal with what they see as corruption in other ways. In February 2009, for example, donors informed President Kibaki of Kenya that they would not channel food aid through the government until the issues of corruption and mismanagement in his administration had been addressed. Rather, the donors insisted upon channeling aid through the World Food Programme. This response raises two questions. First, are donors in a position to judge the level of corruption in a foreign government? After all, what qualifies as corrupt in one country may be a standard transaction in another. Second, to whom are international NGOs accountable?

The issue of NGO accountability is greatly contested within the development literature. Generally, international NGOs are not accountable to the people to whom they provide services, but rather to their donors, some who may know relatively little about effective program implementation within a developing country. If an international NGO fails to avert a famine, it rarely suffers any consequences.

Additionally, there is the issue of creating dependency. It has been argued, with some empirical evidence, that the influx of foreign food aid can hurt domestic markets by undercutting domestic producers and driving them out of business. O’Grada notes that the 1999 Food Aid Convention stipulates that food aid be “culturally acceptable” and, where possible, not interfere with indigenous food markets. But in situations that require immediate action and in which local governments, private producers, and NGOs have little in the way of effective communication or cooperation, this sort of stipulation is impractical. Furthermore, the line between non-interference in domestic markets and allowing people to starve is blurred, and erring on the side of caution to prevent deaths seems prudent. These issues are extremely difficult to address and thus make the international prevention of famine an arduous task.

Furthermore, the extent to which foreign governments forward their own agendas in offering food aid is a controversial issue. Without a comprehensive and legitimate system governing international famine prevention, foreign governments are also not held accountable for the ways in which they offer or fail to offer aid. O’Grada notes that foreign aid is rarely disinterested. He quotes US Senator Hubert Humphrey as saying “Food is power!” in reference to US foreign assistance. He further cites the 1974 example of the United States holding back aid to Bangladesh until it ceased exporting jute to Cuba. When American food arrived it was “too late for famine victims”.

The eventual elimination of famine is dependent on the continued economic and political development of impoverished nations. National governments, which can be held accountable by their constituents, have incentives to prevent such disasters. The problem for the time being, however, is how the international aid regime should address food crises. O’Grada’s book, while briefly laying out these issues, does little to help the reader puzzle through their complex implications. If international NGOs and foreign aid remain the major avenues for famine relief, we must recognise the inherently political nature of those organisations, their intentions, and their accountability. This accountability should not run from the NGO director to the foreign donor, as it currently does. Rather, donors and NGOs should be accountable to famine victims, the very people they are trying to help.

Amreeta Mathai is reading for an MPhil in Development Studies at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She is a contributing editor of the Oxonian Review.

When the Oxonian Review sat down with Paul Collier in his office at Oxford’s Centre for the Study of African Economies, he had just returned from a visit with the US State Department, where he had briefed top American policy makers on his rescue plan for the world’s poorest countries. With the publication of his first book, The Bottom Billion (2007), Paul Collier established himself as a premier authority on international development, presenting aid solutions for the world’s poorest billion inhabitants. In his newest book, Wars, Guns and Votes, Collier moves into the contentious realm of policymaking. Collier anticipates controversy. He writes in Wars, Guns and Votes: “I am aware that I walk on a tightrope.” And he is. Wars, Guns and Votes came out in the UK last week.

A major theme of your book is that democracy can be dangerous if elections are installed without providing the critical public good of security. You propose a game plan that involves installing peacekeepers to the bottom billion countries for at least a decade. This calls for long term intervention by the international community. Could you clarify your criteria for when national sovereignty should be breached?

I think national sovereignty being breached is a melodramatic way of putting it, but there are two distinct contexts that concern us. One is post-conflict situations. Obviously, in conflict situations, when they begin, something has gone terribly wrong with the poverty; you’ve had a civil war. The record of these post-conflict periods is not very happy… about 40 percent of these countries go back into conflict within a decade, and they are responsible for about half of the civil wars that have happened. So we should be able to, as an international community, do much better than that record.

The international community has a big responsibility to the whole neighbourhood because if these situations go wrong, it is the whole neighbourhood that bears the responsibility, not just the country itself.  This is one reason why there is a case for limiting sovereignty or sharing sovereignty on behalf of the legitimate interest of the neighbourhood. The international community is providing peace through the peacekeepers and the money for reconstruction and that gives it both the power and the legitimacy to make sure that the recovery works. […]

There are three key actors and there are no quick fixes. There is the Security Council which is providing the peacekeepers. There are the donors who are providing the money. And there’s the post-conflict government which is setting the policies and also determining how accountable they are to the people. So what I propose is a contract between these three parties and to recognise the interdependence.

But what about the third actor? The local government? Don’t you think that your game plan gives Mugabe the exact propaganda he needs to say: “Look, Western policemen are taking over Africa?”

Of course he will. You can hear him say it. You have to use your brain and say who has actually got the interest of these societies? Is it Mugabe with his fine record or is it mine? The truth is that there is no appetite for a new bout of colonialism. On the contrary, the main problem is that the appetite for concern is so low, and the prevailing sentiment is: “Just wash your hands of it and do things that are decorative.” So, the difficulty is not trying to restrain a voraciously powerful West that wants to restore colonialism, it’s trying to persuade a West that is [complacent]. I was on Capitol Hill just recently and the sentiment that was expressed to me, in the case of Somalia, was: “Build a fence around it and walk by.”

And what a lot of the bottom billion countries have is not national sovereignty; it’s presidential sovereignty. Presidents won’t share power with their own citizens. It’s grotesque that Mugabe is still in power, and certainly not thanks to the endorsement of [Zimbabwe’s] people. Nor will they pool power with their neighbouring government. […]

Presidents are clinging onto power vis-a-vis their own populations and vis-a-vis their neighbours. The result is that their states are not capable of supplying key public goods, so they’ll have to be supplied internationally.

Just now, you mentioned that you went to Washington to convince people to buy into your plan. And in the book, you put yourself in the shoes of a rational dictator weighing pros and cons of allowing international intervention. If you were in front of Mugabe now and had the ear of Obama, how would you persuade them both to sign onto your plan?

I was in the State Department on Monday and talking through these issues. Clearly, the Administration has a lot of legitimacy in Africa. If there were a fair election in Zimbabwe between Mugabe and Obama, Obama would win it easily. So in terms of who is the most legitimate actor, it is clearly Obama. So the issue with America is not legitimacy but overload. It’s whether they see sufficient interest to move. And the argument has to be a combination of an ethical argument based on compassion (here are people socially integrated into the world but economically completely marginalised; they cannot provide the key public goods themselves, so we have to help them to back out of the cul-de-sac they’re in), and a degree of enlightened self-interest—that it is actually foolish to leave societies so precarious that some of them become Somalias. The strategy of building a fence around Somalia and hoping that it disappears seems to me, really, an ostrich-line strategy.

The muddle over American intervention or non-intervention has been so extreme, ranging from total non-intervention (Somalia) to total intervention (Iraq), and a new discourse coming out of Hilary Clinton is “smart power”. That’s a hopeful discourse because what she means is a minimal use of hard power aligned with an intelligent use of soft power. And that seems to me to be the right approach because we haven’t got much appetite for hard power, but […] we can show that the minimum of hard power aligned with an intelligent use of soft power (money, international standards, legitimacy of Obama) can make a difference.

How was your dual argument for ethical compassion and enlightened self-interest received when you actually talked about this to Washington? Did they buy it?

Oh, absolutely. There’s a lot of buy in. I’ve been amazed ever since the publication of The Bottom Billion, there’s been a huge interest on the part of government to align with the agenda. Obviously, not people like Mugabe… they’re a part of the problem.

So the State Department got on board with this?

Well, you have to ask the State Department. But they invited me, and yes, I think there’s a lot of interest both in Europe and in America.

What were their objections?

I think… one strand of opinion would be basically pessimistic and say we’ve failed and failed, there is no point in trying anymore. So there’s a lot of fatigue and despair. And the other sentiment is the sort of, “build a fence and ignore it”…

So the White House didn’t object to your plan based on shortage of resources?

No. And of course, my approach is not just saying that all we need is twice as much money as you’d ever thought of. It’s a matter of marrying money with other policy interventions such as trade, governance, security. For example, I am having a discourse with the American administration on Haiti at the moment. They’ve already done the trade deal with Haiti. So now, the thing to do is to provide the rather modest amount of money that would make it feasible to export on the basis of that trade deal.

The US government has been involved in several coups of democratically elected leaders. Given that track record, do you think it’s really plausible for African dictators to buy into your proposed bait of offering to help them put down possible coups?

What I would like to see military intervention to be used for is to discourage coup d’états. There have been three coups in West Africa in this past week. I’m sure at this very moment, African presidents really are lying awake at night worrying about coup d’états. And the tragedy of coup d’états is that they displace democratic governments just as much as bad governments. Now, I don’t think we should try and prevent all coup d’états… the international community should use its military force to restore democratically elected governments—I don’t see any ethical issue in that. It would actually be disgraceful to do anything else. We already did it in Sierra Leone and nobody accused the international community of neo-colonialism in doing that. So there is a legitimate role for force, serious force in protecting democratic governments.

Now, the neat twist to that is that once you’ve got an undertaking to protect democratic governments, there has to be one condition at least, which is that the government conducts a democratic election. If it cheats, it should not be protected. So I propose an international standard that governments could undertake to adopt on the conduct of elections. And if they adopted that standard, they would be protected, as long as they conducted the election properly. If they then subsequently cheated on an election, that cover against the coup would be withdrawn, and the withdrawal would be a signal. Knowing that, presidents would be much more weary of cheating on elections…

What I was asking was not a normative question of whether or not the US and the international community should intervene to install democratic elections. I am saying that sometimes, the US government actually intervenes to put down democratically governments. Given this track record, how can they be trusted to safeguard democracy?

That’s why it is so important to have clear rules of engagement. When is it legitimate to use military force and when is it not? America’s got a force AFRICOM and that force needs clear rules of engagement because otherwise, as you say, it is going to be treated with a lot of suspicion. But the right rule of engagement is not “never intervene”. If there were a coup in Ghana tomorrow, the right rule of engagement would be to fly in and restore the legitimate government. If there were a coup in Zimbabwe tomorrow, the right rule of engagement would not be to fly in and restore Mugabe—and so we need clear rules to delineate that.

You propose a ten-year period of peacekeeping, during which the economy of the [post-conflict] country is supposed to double. If the economy doesn’t double, what do you propose then?

First of all, there’s already a lot of peacekeepers in there, there are over 100,000 of them now, so this is the future, like it or not. So, the question is really complementary strategies to peacekeeping. Precisely because these economies go so far down during the conflict, it’s relatively easy to get strong growth post-conflict, as long as you’ve got some restoration of reasonable policies, a guarantee of security and flows of aid. So it’s not difficult to get rapid growth. If you don’t get growth, then it’s true, quite possibly you haven’t got a viable exit strategy. Then you’ve got some hard choices, but the world doesn’t come in nice easy boxes.

What are some of those choices?

Well, do you pull the troops out anyway? Or, do you say: “This is harder than we thought, this is longer than we thought.” So, take a country like Liberia or Sierra Leone, or Haiti. So far, economic recovery hasn’t been that great. So does the international community just say: “Time’s up, bye-bye?”

Personally, I think that would be very foolish. Post-conflict is often messy, so the right thing to do is to do what it takes to get recovery… the US left over 100,000 troops in Europe for 40 years to get recovery, and it was a good strategy…it was the right thing to do.

Diana Fu is reading for a DPhil in Politics at Linacre College, Oxford, and is Politics Editor of the Oxonian Review. Amreeta Mathai is reading for an MPhil in Development Studies at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Photograph courtesy of Paul Collier

Paul Collier
Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places
The Bodley Head, 2009
272 pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1847920218

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When development economics guru Paul Collier released his bestselling book The Bottom Billion (2007), Niall Ferguson welcomed him into the fold of the African development debate with a punch: “Now comes another white man, ready to shoulder the burden of saving Africa.” Despite the jab, however, Ferguson went on to praise Collier’s approach, which focused on four “traps” that maintain extreme poverty among the world’s poorest billion inhabitants. Ferguson called Collier’s analysis “more convincing” and his remedies “more plausible” than those offered by the other popular giants of development economics, William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs.

In his newest book Wars, Guns and Votes, Collier has shifted his discussion to the failing democracies that govern many of the world’s poorest “bottom billion”. He argues that elections often create the façade of democracy in bottom billion countries rather than democracy itself. Lacking the enforcement and balance-of-power mechanisms of real democracy, these countries remain on the brink of instability and vulnerable to the sort of violence that stalls development. The post-election violence and controversy surrounding the Kenyan and Zimbabwean elections, the most recent and vivid examples of democracy gone wrong in bottom billion countries, seemed to prove Collier’s point.

Collier offers a nuanced and compelling diagnosis of the driving factors behind post-election violence and persistent bad governance in Africa’s bottom billion democracies. One such factor is inadequate information dispersal, which leaves voters in bottom billion countries in the dark about candidates’ political positions and personal histories. Suspicious of the information they do receive, voters start to make decisions based on who they think is most likely to forward their own interests, often voting divisively along ethnic or religious lines. When honesty and a record of competence fail to offer an advantage in elections, the result, Collier argues, is that “the crooks will replace the honest as candidates”. Wars, Guns and Votes drives to the root of the illiberal democracy that governs many of the world’s poorest; Collier perceptively describes how democracy in its malformed varieties promotes instability and poverty rather than peace and development.

But the analytical rigour that Collier applies to his diagnosis of bad governance in the first part of his book is then absent in his book’s final section of proposed solutions. This becomes particularly troubling when he arrives at his more provocative suggestions. For example, Collier asserts that the West, cognizant of colonialism’s sins, pays “excessive respect” to the “notion of national sovereignty”. What Western donor countries have failed to realise, he says, is that “in reality the typical society of the bottom billion does not have national sovereignty”. Rather, because they lack the ability to constrain the power of an election’s winner, “they have presidential sovereignty”, which can come in the form of democracy-backed dictatorship. We should not, Collier argues, be so ready to revere this sort of sovereignty.

For Collier, sovereignty is defined by a country’s ability and imperative to govern for the people. When bottom billion governments fail to provide key public goods like security, accountability and transparency, he posits that the “international community”—a term that he fails to define in any consistent or plausible fashion—bears responsibility to intervene and supply them. He proposes a number of methods of intervention: most notable are long-term peacekeeping and a system of shared sovereignty (the bottom billion nation would agree to “share” its sovereignty with the international community). In a post-Iraq, post-colonial world, such controversial “remedies” require great clarity of method and purpose. Collier fumbles in answering the question of when, exactly, intervention is warranted and how, exactly, it should be carried out—and confused prescriptions for intervention are, as they always have been, particularly dangerous.

Once the “international community” intervenes in a post-conflict country, how long do they stay and to what end? Collier says the international community should stay for the long haul: “Aid-assisted economic recovery is the true exit strategy for peace-keepers.” But debates on the effectiveness of long-term peacekeeping and aid are particularly contentious for good reason. To propose such measures as if their validity is obvious is to ignore studies that suggest how long-term peacekeeping and aid actually can exacerbate, rather than mitigate, unstable situations.

Collier sidesteps these issues by comparing his suggested intervention to the Marshall Plan. The vague historical comparison brushes over one of many extremely relevant differences: George C. Marshall did not doubt the sovereignty of post-war European nations in the way that Collier does in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, in a speech delivered at Harvard University in 1947, Marshall made it clear that the aid package was to be directed to the needs of Europe as stated by Europeans. He declared: “This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe.”

While Marshall, in forwarding his comprehensive plan for aid, was confident in Europe’s ability to guide its own development, Collier clearly suggests that bottom billion governments cannot do the same. Post-war Europe was re-building its institutions, national infrastructure and informed electorate; that project was entirely different from the building project Collier envisions for the bottom billion.

While we might agree that intervention to quell genocide or to help a sovereign government avert disaster is justified or morally imperative, the grounds for Collier’s suggested intervention are muddled. It seems apt to compare Collier’s proposals to the Bush administration’s nation-building project in Iraq, where the strategy was to enforce peace in a post-election nation and at the same time funnel resources that would promote economic development. By most accounts, the strategy was a disaster.

While Collier does make a valuable contribution by furthering an understanding of the pragmatics of democracy’s failures in bottom billion nations, his lack of clarity on intervention treads on territory that blurs the line between aid and occupation, assistance and intervention. A respected scholar, Collier has won the confidence and audience of several world leaders; it would be irresponsible to use this influence to forward confused plans for intervention, something that, particularly in light of recent history, raises eyebrows the world over.

Amreeta Mathai is reading for an MPhil in Development Studies at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.